How to Transfer Photos From iPhone to Android

Moving between phone platforms used to be genuinely unpleasant. Photos are now the easy part, provided you pick the right route for the size of your library and check one thing before starting.

That one thing is storage. Nearly every failed transfer is a Google account running out of free space halfway through, and it is far better to discover that before the upload than during it.

Pick the route that fits

The Google Photos route is the default recommendation because it survives interruption, needs no cables, and leaves a cloud copy afterwards. The cable route is faster if you happen to be setting up the Android phone for the first time right now.

Check your Google storage first

Google gives 15GB free, shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. A phone with several years of photos and video will be well past that.

Go to one.google.com/storage in a browser and look at the breakdown. Compare it against what your iPhone says it is using: Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Photos.

If the library will not fit, you have three options:

1. Pay for a month of Google One. The smallest tier covers most libraries and you can cancel after. This is the pragmatic answer.
2. Clear space first. Old emails with large attachments are usually the biggest win. Our guides on finding and deleting large emails in Gmail and what is using your Google storage cover where the space actually goes.
3. Use a non-cloud route from the sections below.

What you should not do is start a 60GB upload against 3GB of free space and assume it will work out. It stops when the quota is reached and the rest is silently not transferred, which is only obvious weeks later.

The Google Photos route

1. Install Google Photos on the iPhone from the App Store.
2. Sign in with the same Google account the Android phone uses. Getting this wrong is the other common failure, and it is fiddly to undo.
3. Open the app’s settings and turn on Backup.
4. Choose the quality:
   • Original quality uploads files untouched and uses your quota accordingly.
   • Storage saver re-encodes at a lower quality and fits considerably more. Fine for ordinary phone photos, less so for anything you may want to print.
5. Plug the phone in, connect to Wi-Fi, and leave it.

Keep the app in the foreground if backup keeps pausing. iOS limits what background apps may do, and a large upload runs far more reliably with the screen on and the app open. Setting the screen to never auto-lock whilst it runs helps.

Progress shows at the top of the app. When it reports that backup is complete, open Google Photos on the Android phone and your library is there.

What does and does not come across

Photos, videos and their dates and locations all transfer. HEIC files are handled transparently, so you do not need to convert anything — though if you want local JPEG copies for some other purpose, our HEIC to JPG converter does it without uploading anything.

Albums are the gap. The album structure lives in Apple’s photo library rather than in the files themselves, and Google Photos does not reconstruct it. Every photo arrives; the grouping does not. If specific albums matter, share each one to Google Photos separately before running the full backup, which preserves it as a Google Photos album.

Edits made in the Photos app are usually baked into what uploads. The ability to revert to the original is not preserved.

The cable route, during Android setup

If the Android phone is new and not yet set up, its setup wizard offers to copy data from an iPhone over a cable. You need a USB-C to Lightning cable, or USB-C to USB-C for an iPhone 15 or later.

1. Start the Android phone’s initial setup.
2. When it asks about copying data, choose the option for an iPhone or other device and select the cable method.
3. Connect the two phones, unlock the iPhone, and approve the trust prompt.
4. Choose what to copy. Photos and videos are one of the categories.

This is the fastest route for a full migration and it carries contacts, messages and calendar entries at the same time. The limitation is timing: it runs during initial setup, so if the Android phone is already configured you would need to factory reset it to get this screen back, which is rarely worth it.

Samsung’s Smart Switch does the same job and also works after setup, which is a genuine advantage if you have a Samsung phone.

Via a computer

Slower, but you end up with a copy on a drive you control, which is worth something.

On Windows: connect the iPhone with a cable, unlock it, and tap Trust on the prompt. It appears in File Explorer under This PC. The photos are in Internal Storage\DCIM, spread across folders named 100APPLE, 101APPLE and so on. Copy them to a folder on the PC, then connect the Android phone in File transfer mode and copy them into its Pictures or DCIM folder.

If the iPhone does not appear, the causes are specific and covered in iPhone photos not showing on your PC. The Android side has its own set, in Android phone not showing up on PC over USB.

On macOS: use the Photos app or Image Capture to export from the iPhone, then Android File Transfer to copy onto the Android phone.

One thing to set on the iPhone before copying: Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC, and choose Keep Originals rather than Automatic. Automatic converts HEIC to JPEG during transfer, which is convenient but means you are not getting the original files.

Smaller transfers

For a handful of photos, none of the above is worth setting up.

• Google Drive or Dropbox. Upload from the iPhone’s share sheet, download on Android.
• A direct transfer app such as Send Anywhere or Snapdrop, which move files over the local Wi-Fi network between any two devices with a browser.
• WhatsApp or any messaging app, accepting that most of them compress images heavily. Fine for sharing, not for anything you want to keep at full quality.
• Email, for under about 20MB, which is roughly five full-resolution photos.

What to expect

A Google Photos backup of a large library takes hours and occasionally most of a day, almost entirely limited by your home upload speed rather than by anything either phone is doing. Start it in the evening and check in the morning.

The realistic outcome is that every photo and video arrives, dates and locations intact, and your album structure does not. That is the honest trade for a route that otherwise needs no cables and no decisions.

Keep the iPhone, or at least its photo library, until you have confirmed the count on the Android side matches. Google Photos shows totals in its settings, and the iPhone shows its own under the Photos app. Two numbers that match is better evidence than a progress bar that said it finished.